You don't say?

About a week or so ago I was on the gaming/chat site Pogo, playing some mah jong and just generally wasting time until I was tired. Well this lady enters the game room I am in and first thing she says in the chat is "Hello and God bless you all". Someone replied with "God bless you as well." It's not just because I'm an atheist that I found this to be a rather rude and offensive thing to say. What if I were Buddhist? or Hindu? Or even Muslim? So just to see what would be said, if I would get polite responses back I said "May Allah bless you as well." Was this a bit of sh!t disturbing on my part? Maybe, it was late, I was bored and couldn't sleep.

What followed was a rather long discussion about religion and how wonderful it is and how terrible I am for not believing in gods. This lady insisted that I hate children and Santa Claus because I don't believe in her god. I hate children because I hate children, even when I believed in god I hated children. The thing that got me though was her remark about Santa. I asked her why should I dislike him? What did he ever do? Nothing, he's not a real person (much like her god, but I didn't say that).

I said I see no reason for me to hate Santa and therefore ruin the idea of him for small children, he has nothing to do with the actually reason for the holiday. Unless Santa and Jesus are the same person and I'm pretty sure they're not, I think it's ok for me to have no real beefs with Santa. When I pointed out the fact that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ and not a celebration of Santa she told me I was wrong that the two things are pretty much the same. As well as the Easter bunny and Easter. When I told her that she was commercializing the holidays for our modern world, she asked me if I believed in god and celebrated the holidays would I do so without Santa and the bunny. Well if I were going to claim to be a TRUE christian as she was doing, yes I would celebrate the true meaning of those holidays but, this again made me a bad person.

Next came the topic of family and whether or not family shared the same beliefs. Well when I told her my dad was religious and I'm not, she had the nerve to say that "well then I can guarantee he isn't having a good time with you when you visit." Most of you know what has recently been going on with my father in regards to his health, this hurt a lot. She had the balls to suggest that my father just pretends to like me simply because he is my father and has too. I set her straight very quickly.

To end the conversation, I gave her one of my favorite quotes:

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.” Steven Weinberg.

Well she told me that quote makes absolutely NO SENSE. I had already been questioning her intelligence, now I was quite sure she wasn't very bright. When I tried to explain it to her using people who kill doctors who perform abortions, suicide bombers, honor killings etc. She said it was clear I was just making stuff up and had been proven wrong and should just give up my silly argument. So I tried one more time to explain to her "if I kill a doctor who performs abortions I'm a bad person right?" she agreed. "Ok now if I do so and say it is gods wishes, because what this doctordoes is against gods word, religious people will think that I'm some sort of hero for doing 'gods work'" She still couldn't or likely refused to see that it's true.

Apparently choosing to believe that life itself is a wonderful and miraculous thing and being quite content in that knowledge gives you a bad attitude. Because I believe in science, reason and logic I am just a generally unhappy person. In order to be truly happy on Earth you have to believe that there is a higher power and when we die, we go to something bigger, better and more amazing than this. Because lets be honest out of all the planets in the universe we somehow wind up here and this isn't enough. There has to be more, there needs to more. Some people really are greedy aren't they?

I think some are disappointed with life in general can't accept that this is it and there has to be something better. My theistic wife respects my choice to be an atheist but has a hard time with current life as we know it. There those out there that have screwed this life up so bad want there to be a better alternative.